I ARRIVE AT THE Eggleston Artistic Trust building at just after 1 on a sweltering, humid Memphis afternoon. I am met at the door by the charismatic son of the photographer William Eggleston, Winston, who is the director of the trust as well as its official archivist. He ushers me into the cool, darkened rear office where his father sits at one of two substantial desks that are positioned face to face, occupying the center of the room. Large photographic proof sheets hang on the walls along with old Coke signs. An illuminated jukebox sits in the corner beside a red midcentury sofa.

At 77, Eggleston is mischievous, beguiling, puzzling and fascinating, all in nearly equal measure. He has been called a legend and an icon. He is frequently referred to as “the godfather of color photography,” even though the sensational 1976 solo exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that established him as such was widely panned at the time. “Critics and so forth obviously weren’t really looking at this stuff,” he says today. “Didn’t bother me a bit. I laughed at ’em.”

Eggleston is impeccably dressed in what he wears every day: a dark suit that he tells me was made for him on Savile Row, highly polished black shoes, a white shirt and an untied bow tie around the neck. He smells like bourbon and body lotion. He wears a Cartier watch, two minutes slow. I ask if he likes to talk about photography. Eggleston closes his eyes. “It’s tricky,” he says. “Words and pictures don’t — they’re like two different animals. They don’t particularly like each other.” He speaks in almost a whisper, his dapper Southern drawl relaxed further with a slur.

I mention that for decades people have studied his compositions, the geometry of his images, which seem to grow more complex the more you look. But this sort of analysis of his work strikes Eggleston as “nonsense.” Photography is second nature to him — intuitive not analytical. “I know they’re there, the angles and compositions,” he says. “Every little minute thing works with every other one there. All of these images are composed. They’re little paintings to me.”

But one wouldn’t call him a fan, exactly, of photography. “Oh, half of what’s out there is worthless,” he scoffs. “The only pictures I like are the ones I’ve taken.” In a way, somebody like Ansel Adams strikes me as the very antithesis of Eggleston, so I ask what he thinks of him. “We didn’t know each other,” he says, “but if we did, I’d tell him the same thing: ‘I hate your work.’ ” I had read, though, that he admired Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer famed for his work capturing “the decisive moment,” who said one thing Eggleston recalls with fondness: “You know, William, color is bullshit.” I ask if the remark dented his confidence. “Oh, no. I just said, ‘Please excuse me,’ and left the table. I went to another table and partied.”

Eggleston’s images can trick you if you’re not careful. You have to look at them, then you have to look again and then keep looking until the reason he took the picture kind of clicks in your chest. In one photograph, taken in the mid-1970s, a beautiful boy — his son Winston — sits in a padded restaurant booth looking down at a magazine. Printed on both pages of the magazine (upside down to the viewer) are guns. The image is a one-two punch. The innocence of the boy breaks your heart; what he’s reading then stops it for a beat. I tell him, “When I look at it, it makes me hold my breath a little bit. Do you know what I mean?” He says, simply, “I do. I feel the same way. I think that’s an incredibly wonderful picture. I don’t know why.”

Video

William Eggleston

A day in the life of the photographer, accompanied by the artist Wolfgang Tillmans.

In another famous shot, a naked man stands in a blood-red bedroom. It feels slightly hallucinogenic and also somewhat sinister: Why is he naked? Why is the room a mess? I ask Eggleston about the man. “He was my best friend in the world,” he tells me, before adding, “He was murdered. Somebody hit him in the head with an ax.” Of yet another famous photo — depicting a longhaired girl lying on the grass, eyes closed, a camera in her left hand — he tells me she wasn’t sleeping, she was on Quaaludes.

As I look through hundreds of his pictures (“You’re going too fast,” he scolds), I wonder about the images Eggleston doesn’t take. If he’ll shoot a freezer stocked with frozen entrees, why not the refrigerator below? So I ask about the times when he thinks of taking an image, perhaps even raises the camera to his eye, but then changes his mind. What I want to know is, what makes him decide not to shoot something? “That doesn’t happen,” he says with firm authority. When he raises the camera to his eye it’s because he’s going to take a picture and the picture is going to work, the end. He either takes one photograph of his subject or no photographs of it. There is never a moment of internal consideration or indecision — there is only certainty — which explains why he has no favorites: “Each one, to me, is equal, or I didn’t take it to begin with.” Eggleston can find the perfect gem without ever having to even sift: “I never think about it beforehand. When I get there, something happens and in a split second the picture emerges.”

Photo

Credit
Wolfgang Tillmans

A period of silence ensues but he does not appear uncomfortable or impatient in the least. I realize it doesn’t matter what we talk about, or if we talk at all. “The only thing one can do is really look at the damn things. It’s just not making much sense to talk about them,” he says.

He politely answers every one of my questions, sometimes prefaced with a weary, “I’ve been asked that before.” I have the feeling I could ask him what his credit card number is and he would tell me if he knew it. It’s not that he’s easygoing but rather somehow abstract, as if he exists on a plane elsewhere and visits occasionally when pressed. When I show him Kim Kardashian West’s Instagram, he says, “I don’t know who that is. I’ve never even heard that name. I mean, she’s famous like me?” He has an otherworldly quality which explains, completely, the answer he gave me when I posed the question, if he had to relive his life and couldn’t be a photographer what might he have done? He replied at once, “Quantum physics.”

This makes sense. While I may not be able to imagine Eggleston navigating through the mundanities of life, such as shopping for groceries or filling out a form of any kind, I can imagine a sober, sharpened, parallel-universe version of him scribbling out a Unified Theory of Everything on a paper napkin and then tucking it as a kind favor into Albert Einstein’s astonished hand. The flow of endless cigarettes, bottomless drinks, continuous images, the “why try to explain it?”-ness of the man himself: These qualities testify to something indefinable and Schrödinger’s-cat-like woven into his very nature. The Eggleston of this universe is a self-taught photographer who has succeeded in proving all his savage, elitist and uncomprehending original critics — including The New York Times — utterly, deliciously wrong. In his pressed suit he stands vindicated, fire bursting from his fingertips as he lights another American Spirit, a flesh-and-blood world changer. Everywhere he looks he notices things others miss. “I see great pictures all the time,” he says, and that is unequivocally dazzling.

WE LEAVE THE OFFICES of the Eggleston Trust and go to his apartment. The first thing one sees upon entering is a bright red plastic sign with a yellow border, printed with capitalized white sans-serif text. It warns, “THE OCCUPANT OF THIS APARTMENT WAS RECENTLY HOSPITALIZED FOR COMPLICATIONS DUE TO ALCOHOL. HE IS ON A MEDICALLY PRESCRIBED DAILY PORTION OF ALCOHOL. IF YOU BRING ADDITIONAL ALCOHOL INTO THIS APARTMENT YOU ARE PLACING HIM IN MORTAL DANGER. YOUR ENTRY AND EXIT INTO THIS APARTMENT IS BEING RECORDED. WE WILL PROSECUTE SHOULD THIS NOTICE BE IGNORED. THE EGGLESTON FAMILY.” It is a devastating thing to see. Heartbreaking. I was also an alcoholic for decades, the kind who had shakes and saw spiders. I’m not even through the hallway and my mind is racing from “I want that sign” to “What kind of doctor prescribes alcohol for an alcoholic? Where was he when I was drinking?”

William Eggleston is featured on one of the covers of T's Oct. 23 Greats issue.

I ask if his drinking ever got in the way of his photography. “I’ve never been able to take a picture after a drink,” he says. “It just doesn’t work. Maybe — I don’t know what it is. It’s not like I’m too drunk to take a picture. I just — the whole idea of it just goes away after one or two drinks.” Eggleston perches atop the bench in front of his Bösendorfer concert grand piano. An active ashtray and a sweating tumbler of icy bourbon on a burn-marked coaster sit inside the piano directly on the frame. He reaches for the glass and takes several small, noisy sips and his body visibly relaxes. I know his relief, exactly. “I’m gonna get this drink down,” he tells me. And as soon as he does he wants another. He suggests that I pour one for myself and join him but I tell him that I don’t drink anymore, that once I start I can’t ever stop. He replies, “Well, I can stop, but I’ll admit I want another one.”

With a fresh drink beading water atop his piano, Eggleston plays “Ol’ Man River” from the Broadway musical “Show Boat.” At times, I recognize the piece, but then beneath Eggleston’s deft fingers it wanders off, meandering and exploring. He plays for 20 minutes, never quite beginning or ending but also never hitting a single sour note.

“Are you a genius?” I ask him. His fingers instantly leave the piano keys, suspended in midair above them, and he swivels toward me with an expression of bald incredulity, as if I have asked, “Do you use toilet paper?” His eyes are grayish-blue until just before the pupil where the color becomes something close to honey, and they are fixed on my own. He replies in a breathy, almost pitying drawl, “Well, yes.” The unspoken message is clear: You’ve spent all day with me and you even have to ask?

A version of this article appears in print on October 23, 2016, on Page M2155 of T Magazine with the headline: William Eggleston. Today's Paper|Subscribe